The Black Echo by Michael Connelly is the first Harry Bosch novel (of 25, currently) and was published in 1992. About a decade ago, when the Harry Bosch TV series first appeared on Amazon Prime, I fell in love with the character and stories. By the way, Titus Welliver IS Harry Bosch. He was the perfect casting choice for our hero. Anyway, I made a mental note at the time to start reading the novels in order, but like a lot of my mental notes it got lost in the shuffle.

A couple of weeks ago, while watching the final season of the spin-off series, Bosch: Legacy (also on Prime) I decided to follow through on that mental note I made so long ago.

I’m glad I did. I’m sure you get a many of Bosch’s motivations from the later novels, but this first one also gives you a lot to go on. He’s rough around the edges, single-minded and not always a team player. And those are his good points, lol.

When a man turns up dead Detective Harry Bosch of the LAPD begins investigating and finds the dead man is a former army buddy of his from his days in Vietnam. They both were “tunnel rats”, soldiers who bravely crawled through underground tunnels beneath villages and throughout the countryside, searching for enemy fighters. The book gets its title from the term they used when looking into a dark tunnel opening and feeling like the black of it echoed back on them.

Although the first book in the series, we find that we are well into Bosch’s career at this point. He has risen to the rank of detective but has suffered some career setbacks. A lot of them harken back to a case earlier in his career and he is seemingly never regarded as part of “the family” of LA’s finest. He has a moral compass and a bulldog sense of relentlessness that does not always endear him to his fellow law enforcement colleagues. Including his sometime partner, Detective Jerome “Jerry” Edgar, whom Bosch sarcastically calls “J. Edgar” as a reference to J. Edgar Hoover, first director of the FBI.

Bosch’s victim, it turns out, is tied to a major unsolved crime from a year before involving criminals tunneling underground into a bank safety deposit box vault. That crime is being investigated by the FBI. Bosch is assigned to work with a female FBI agent, Eleanor Wish, who is heading up the investigation. In fact, because of his past as an army tunnel rat, Bosch had initially been considered a suspect by the FBI. He was cleared because he was out of the country during the break-in. But Bosch never even knew he was a suspect until he is brought into the FBI investigation.

It soon becomes obvious the crooks were after one specific thing in one specific safety depict box, though no one was sure what that one thing was until Bosch ties it to former police officials in Vietnam who fled to the U.S. in the last days of the war. Now, it looks like another heist is planned at another bank using the same methods of tunneling in from underground and looking for the same thing.

During the course of the investigation, Bosch and Wish grow closer and become lovers. When they foil the second break-in attempt, Bosch is shot and wounded while the thieves are getting away. Harry has to go into the tunnel to try and track them down and in doing so, finds that Eleanor’s FBI boss John Rourke is waiting to kill him. Before he can do so, someone shoots Rourke from behind and Harry passes out from blood loss before seeing who it was.

When Bosch awakens in the hospital he has a multitude of questions; chief among them, was Wish in on the bank burglaries? And who was it that killed Rourke before Rourke could kill him in the tunnel?

Those questions are answered before the story ends, but I won’t spoil them for you here.

Michael Connelly is a detailed procedural police story writer, but he also layers in some great character and plot points that keep you interested when the procedural might be a tad boring. It’s a good mixture and obviously it has worked since the man has 25 Harry Bosch books and two TV series built upon those books.

I highly recommend “The Black Echo” and encourage readers who are not familiar with Harry Bosch (or even if you only know him from the TV series) to start with this first book in the series. I’m looking forward to reading the next one.